Mormon Debates, Avoiding Acts 4, Some Personal Encouragement

Well, greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line. It is a Thursday and October is here. Christmas is around the corner. Putting together that trip, starting on October 25th, mainly in the Midwest, all the way up to Bismarck, North Dakota, and Aberdeen, South Dakota, and just outside Des Moines, and just outside of Kansas City, and Hayes, Kansas, and place in Colorado, in Northeastern Colorado, and still don't have any friends in Amarillo.

Would love to have some friends in Amarillo. Had some connections there. I guess things have changed. Maybe I've changed or they've changed. I don't know. I put a word out on X, but if you have some, if you know some like-minded folks in Amarillo, let me know because there's a really cool, really, really cool RV place in Amarillo.

I stayed there just one night, and I'd like to stay there two nights on the way back because there is a, as part of the store that the RV park is attached to, is a 12-month Christmas store. It's open all year round, and man, you could walk around that store, that whole place, for hours.

It is so cool, and I'd like to get a little early Christmas shopping done since we're not going to be heading back to St. Charles this year for the first time in a quarter century. I'm feeling like, you know, I might be able to really get into the Christmas spirit this time around.

Then again, maybe not. We'll find out, but seriously, if you know of some like-minded churches in the Amarillo area, it's not a big city. I understand that, and I may have already exhausted my contacts there, but let me know because I discovered that RV park the last trip, and it's really nice, and I'd love to spend a little more time there.

Cultural Collapse in France and the West

Anyway, there's a picture on X that I saw, and again, whenever you comment on things like these today, you have to go, if it's real, because the resolution's low, it looks real, it's true to life, but AI can produce anything, whether it's audio, video, photograph.

You can tell AI, give me a low-resolution picture, so it looks like it was taken in the 1980s or something like that, and it can do it, and every day it gets better at it, and every day it gets more impossible to detect it.

So, assuming this is real, it's a picture of a fireman in France today. He's on fire. His clothes are burning. He's trying to get his outer clothes off of him, and the background is a crowd of people, none of which look like they're French.

They're all very dark-skinned. They're from someplace else. They were not born in France, and they're all standing there with their phones up, recording. Nobody's helping them. They're just videotaping it.

Why do we even call it that? Well, because we're old. They're videoing it on their phones, and they've all got looks of astonishment on their faces, but no one's concerned, and my understanding is there is just a massive amount of cultural collapse in France today that the North Africans who have invaded France, with the invitation of Macron and the Europeans as a whole, Europe is committing suicide, cultural suicide, right in front of everybody, purposefully.

The same people in the United States that have the same worldview as the people in Brussels are looking like they're going to win the midterms, which means they're going to open the borders back up and say, do it to us too.

Come on in. Destroy everything, because they hate Western society. They hate the Christian background of law, ethics, morality. They're globalists, and they want an autocratic technocracy, and they may well get it.

They may well get it a lot faster than we thought. Trump may be reduced to nothing but the veto pen as long as he's there. I said two years ago, if at the midterms the House goes back to the Democrats, he'll be impeached a record, record, record number of times, a huge number of times, a huge number of impeachments, and if they get the Senate, then it's done.

It won't matter what the charges are. It will not matter in the least what the charges are. It could be spitting on the sidewalk, and the communists, I don't call them Democrats anymore, they are what they are.

They've made it very clear what they are. The communists will overthrow any form of government that is in opposition to what they want, which means the Constitution of the United States, done, finito, finished, over with, and in a very short period of time.

We see it happening in France. France is collapsing. There have been many places you can't go in France, but now it's just spreading all across, and the people in charge in Brussels, and in Germany, and all these other places, they are absolutely intent on keeping those borders open, get as many people in as possible, as much violence, as much chaos, to destroy the old system and bring something in new, and they think they're going to be in charge of what's new, so these people from other countries that think they're somehow accomplishing something, they don't realize these folks just are using them as useful idiots, but that's in the future, and that's after freedom ends.

Again, if it's real, and I know that there is tremendous amount of violence burning, they're burning schools. Oh, I wonder where that might have come from. Oh, Taliban, yeah, they burn schools too. Yeah, it's coming from Islam, and it's coming from the slums of Islam.

It's not coming from the high-end intellectuals of the past of Islam. There aren't that many of them left. It's coming from something else, and it's not very far behind for us, and I consider it to be judgment.

New Testament Manuscript Facsimiles and the History of the Bible

On the table in front of me, I have my new P -52 that just arrived. Westhoff is making me a poor man. There you can see P -52, and I've picked up, I think I'll have six. There's two back here, and I think I'll have a total of six.

They just put out a portion of P -45. I had to get that, because that's what's behind me in the other studio, if we ever see it again. They also sent me the Nash papyrus and a page of P -46 that has the Carmen Christi on it, which I'll bring in and show to you, because I've seen it.

I've actually seen the real one. I've told the story before in Dublin, but they had it reversed so that the Carmen Christi was face down, so you couldn't see it. But that particular leaf, I did see, and was reading to the guys who were with me while we were there in Dublin.

The reason I'm getting them is I'm going to use these in my presentations on New Testament, so I'll put this up on the screen, but then when you've got this, you can sort of go, see, look at this. I've always said the fragment that we have is about the size of a credit card.

Well, look at that. That's about the size of a credit card. So you get an idea of what its real size is, how small these things are. And really, just the fact that something like this would survive for 1 ,800 years, 1 ,900 years, you've got to start talking about providence when you start talking about things like that.

Wes and his guys do a great job. It's got a real nice etched thing here that tells what it is. The nice thing about this one is that facing me is the verso side, which is John 18, 37 -38. Facing toward you is the recto side, which is John 8, 31 -34.

Well, it's not all of that. It's just that's the portion that is there. And so that's actually etched into the stand itself. I think you can actually get it etched into that if you want to pay extra or something like that, but I didn't.

I've asked Rich to be looking at a book bag I used to carry. In fact, it's a very book bag, so it sort of has some historical value to it. It's the very book bag I used in 1999. I don't throw things out.

In 1999, and I put all that stuff from the Code of Canon Law and the documents referenced in Vatican II and Council of Trent, I put all that official Roman Catholic publication stuff in that book bag.

And that's the book bag I bring up to the podium for my closing statement. And I open it up and I start pulling all this stuff out. So if you go look up James White Mitchell Pack with Sola Scultura, the 1999 debate in San Diego, you'll see that bag.

And so I'm asking Rich, we've learned to use this foam stuff in the RVs. Rich uses it to put the cameras in and electronic stuff in because stuff gets bounced around in an RV and you don't want damaged stuff and things like that.

So it's the same type of high quality packing foam that they use when they're shipping your cameras to you and stuff like that. So we have that stuff and I use it. I really do use it in the RV. Sometimes I use it for insulation, but normally I just use it to keep stuff from getting bounced all over the place.

And so I've asked him to use that book bag and I'll bring all these facsimiles in and we'll figure out a way to put them into that foam so that bag can get bounced all over the place and they'll be fine.

And I can take these into churches. One of the churches on this trip, this upcoming trip at the end of the month, wants to talk about history of the Bible and stuff like that. Put it out front, can have it up on the screen and also see what the actual size looks like.

That'll be a nice addition, I think. Really will. I could drag Codex Sinaiticus with me too. But that sucker weighs 45 pounds. It really does. I've weighed it. It is a beast. So yeah, there we go. Okay, let's get to it here.

Defining a Clear Debate with a Mormon Apologist

Yeah, I'm sorry. On the last program, I mentioned, I responded to Hayden Carroll. And when I got home, I found an email and he was saying, you bet, we'll do a debate. And here's the debate topic. And the debate topic was, oh, what was that?

Here we go. Oh, that's the wrong one. Hold on a second here. Let me open up the proper one. I want to go ahead and read it because if I'm going to mention it, I need to get the right one here. And let me see here.

Oh, where'd all these emails come from all of a sudden? I cleared my emails out this morning. What on earth? Wow. I have to go to the next page. Yikes. When you got to go to the next page in your email, you all of a sudden became exceptionally popular.

It's October 1st,.

Therefore the flood. I don't know what that means, but. Oh, flood of emails. First of the month,.

Right? Oh, that would be new to me. I have no idea. Okay. It's not pulling up, but, and that's a shame. I wanted to get the exact right one. Yeah. Well, it's not coming up. This email program is really driving me insane.

Its search capacities are zero, just nada. Uh, drives me nuts. Wait a minute. Sent. Let's see if that pulls something up. Yeah, there you go. Um, so here's, here's, okay. Uh, so here's, here's the debate topic that Hayden Carroll sent me.

You ready for this? Okay. Protestants can't justify their standard. Yeah. That's the debate topic. Protestants can't justify their standard. What Protestants? There is no Protestant church. First of all, there is no Protestant creed.

So what Protestant? I mean, that in and of itself is enough to make you chuckle that someone would think this is a debate thesis, but can't justify their standard. What standard? Standard in what? In, uh, in Westminster, in London, mass confession and in the church of England.

What? It is without a doubt the silliest, most worthless debate thesis suggestion I've ever heard in my life. It is impossible to have a debate on something that vague and undefined. I mean, I don't know how anybody who has any debate experience, I mean, a debate coach would go, really?

I mean, he would fail debate 101 by even suggesting a thesis like this. So, um, and I said, I said, that may be honestly the most absurd debate thesis I've ever heard. Um, so I offered two debate theses in response, in response.

Resolved, the Aaronic and Melchizedek priesthoods are necessary for the existence and function of the church of Jesus Christ. Now, until the last 10 years, I cannot think of a single member of the church of Jesus Christ, Latter-day Saints that would have not, not agreed with that thesis.

Not a one. That is the fundamental assertion of the great apostasy. That is the fundamental reason for existence of the LDS church and the restoration under Joseph Smith. I'll read it again. The Aaronic and Melchizedek priesthoods are necessary for the existence and function of the church of Jesus Christ.

I didn't say the church of Jesus Christ, Latter-day Saints. Um, but it's very clear in what it's saying. You take the affirmative. Um, it, it seems to me that the Mormons who are making the claim to be the one true church on earth, or making the claim to have the one prophet, true apostles and prophets of Jesus Christ, nobody else has.

The only priesthood, only their baptism is valid, though a lot of Mormons aren't even aware they believe that. You know, the funny thing is, when I first started talking to those Mormon kids out at the Easter pageant in the 1980s, back when I was still trying to calm Rich down, and talking to the kids out at the Easter pageant in the 1980s, go for it, go for it, buddy.

Um, in the 1980s, none of those kids would have questioned any of that. They would have believed all of it. They all knew. They, they all knew that my baptism is invalid. They all knew that you have to have the Mormon priesthood.

They all knew that. And yet now I talk to Mormons at the Easter pageant, out at the Christmas lights out there and stuff like that, we accept your baptism is valid, and I'm, I'm had that conversation.

I'm looking at this older Mormon that I was talking to, and I look over at him, he sort of looks over at me. The guy leaves and goes, yeah, we're not teaching young people the way we used to. It's like, yeah, certainly not.

I see that. Um, and then I gave a topic that I would defend. So my idea was, we'll do two debates. Each one of us have to take the positive and one of them resolve the triune God of scripture has decreed all things under his own glory.

See, he put a book out in February. Yeah, well, it's a book, it's like 69 pages, something like that, a little teeny thing. But, um, and on the front cover, uh, what was it? Does the triune God will the best for every person or something like that?

The greatest good for every person. I responded, no, no, I'm not sure where you get that. I mean, are, are there, are there lots of evangelicals that would go, oh yeah, sure. God wants the best for your life.

Go to Joel Osteen's church. Um, yeah, but not any type of anybody with a meaningful theological background knows something about church history, something about theology, uh, is not sitting here going, yeah, you know, uh, God's, um, God's plan for the Egyptian army under Pharaoh was just as glowing and bright as that for the Israelites, just the red sea got in the way.

Uh, yeah, no. Um, so, you know, I just answered no. And then I gave scripture passage, which of course get ignored by everybody. It's just not even, we're not even gonna worry about that. Uh, so the triune God of scripture has decreed all things under his own glory.

Uh, I said, early December would be a good timeframe. Uh, he was talking about doing it online. Well, okay, if we have to, but we're both local, so we, we could do it locally, maybe out at, uh, out of our church, uh, or the church that we rent.

Uh, but you know what? In this brand new studio that my wife bought, I'm being facetious out there. Um, um, we, we could, we could do it. We could do a debate in here quite nicely.

Really good. I mean, all I have to do is set up a couple of tables and boom, there we are.

Table on each side. Uh, or, or we could, if we wanted to, if we, if both sides want to make a presentation, uh, you leave this here, you put two table table over here, person sitting on each side. Um, and we've got enough cameras, good grief.

We've, we've got two, four, seven, six, seven cameras in here. Uh, so yeah, we could, we could handle having us sitting over here, podium here, use that as the, you know, we could use the big boards, want to use the big board and, uh, go from there.

Um, so we could do it here. Um, he's local. So there's, there's that, uh, oh, these, oh, wait a minute. Hold on. Okay. So he responded to my email and I just saw this at one 11. So, okay. You told me to back up my claim that you can't justify your standard, the Protestant Bible.

Okay. So if you'd like to just, uh, prompts based on that challenge, I'd be open to ideas. In other words, I'm not defending the priesthood against you. I know I cannot do that. We ain't going to do anything like that.

No way. You see Hayden Carroll is a hyper agnostic. Okay. He applies hyper skepticism to Christianity, but he doesn't apply it to Mormonism. So he knows he has double standards. So he knows there are only certain topics he can go into a debate with and not get absolutely cremated.

And so my initial response to him online was back that up. In other words, explain what you're talking about. Now he says, well, it's the Protestant Bible. So now he wants to do canon. That was not clear from what he said at all.

That's why I said what I said. And I've, I've made it clear what Protestant position, what standard. Okay. Now you're trying to redefine things. Fine. I've given you the theses, either accept it or say, Nope, I will not defend Mormonism.

I will not defend the priesthood. I want defend the current leadership of the LDS church. I want defend the thing that says that we're the one true church and you aren't. And I will not debate you on the idea that the triune God decreed all things under his own glory.

I won't do any of those things because I know I can't. It's up to you, Hayden. It's up to you. The ball's in your court. All right. Real simple. Come up with a real, a realistic thesis. What you gave me was absurd.

As I said, if you took a debate class, you would have failed the assignment. You would have failed the assignment. So there you go. Uh, I need to mark that as unread so that I can get back to it. I mean, I'll respond, but you know, I don't expect him to be listening.

God's Goodness and the Old Testament

Anyway. All right. So, uh, where were we? All right. Get back to, uh, we've got a screen here now. So sometime this morning, um, I had, uh, I had responded to someone, um, a Mormon in the God is good thing that someone had posted a meme.

I think it may have been Jacob Hanson. And it was, and it's an old meme. I mean, these guys can't even come up with new memes. They're recycling old memes. It's the guy putting a clown face on. And so you have some statements and that you can make fun of it by someone with a clown face.

I mean, I mean, it's, it's cheesy. It's cheap. Uh, it, it doesn't take any work at all. Um, these people aren't, don't even take memes seriously, uh, memeology seriously. Anyway, somebody posts this thing about, uh, God is good, but God can do atrocious things.

And, and somebody had attributed that to my position. Well, the funny thing is Mike Porter and Mike Porter has been involved with Alpha Omega Ministries for a very, very long time. I think he was in his teens when we first met, uh, well into his teens when we first met.

Yeah. I was still in high school. Um, Mike has, has endured more physical suffering in his life than I ever could have survived. I'm going to, I'm going to say that right now. Um, he, he has not enjoyed good health, uh, at all.

Uh, he's, uh, uh, on a, you pray, pray for him. He's on a kidney transplant list. He's been doing dialysis for, I don't know how many years, I think it's decades now. Um, and so, but he's got a great mind.

Uh, we've got some really good guys. Um, you know, Simon Escobedo and, and, uh, Mike Porter, they've, they're, they're good friends. They go back and forth all the time. And, uh, Warren Smith was part of that, that group.

And we used to lift weights many, many years ago, uh, back before Mike's health problems, where he started getting to be a problem. And, um, so we go back a long ways and lo and behold, uh, Mike decided he saw a post by Jenna Ellis.

And I try not to mention Jenna Ellis because she frightens me, not because of her arguments at all, um, but, uh, really crazy lawyers. You just sort of want to stay away from. And, um, so he saw a, um, a post from Jenna Ellis where, uh, she made some comments again about this whole idea of the goodness of God.

And, and of course, you know, historically, if you're familiar with what the situation in, in modern academia, a lot of people wonder, why is it that, especially when it comes to the Old Testament, the vast majority of stuff that's published is way off on the left.

It's unbelieving and you can't recommend it to anybody. And when you start digging into it, you, you discover it's the supernatural nature of the Old Testament story. I mean, you've got floating axe heads and you've got talking donkeys and you've got, uh, people being raised from the dead.

And, um, but the big problem is you've got God judging entire nations and using Israel to destroy them, man, woman, child. And we just can't believe things like that anymore. See, because we're fully enlightened and they don't recognize the connection of that with the New Testament and the fulfillment narratives and all the rest of that type of stuff.

But it's extremely, extremely common for even professors of Old Testament. Um, the vast majority, the vast majority of professors of Old Testament teaching and seminaries and Bible colleges today do not believe that there is any one message of the Bible.

I keep forgetting. I need to bring in, I want to bring in a particular Bible I have at home and have it underneath here so I can hold the Bible up once. The Bible is not an iPhone. Um, just, it just doesn't have the same, you know, you hold that up.

Yeah, I've got, I've got all sorts of stuff. I've got more stuff about the Bible on that little piece of equipment than was in any one place 15 years ago. Yeah, easily, easily. But it doesn't have the same feel, you know, and I can't sniff it.

It doesn't smell like leather. It just, I don't know, it doesn't, it does not have the spiritual power behind it. So I need to bring that in. Anyways, the vast majority of these professors, um, do not believe the Bible has a single message.

They believe especially the Old Testament is contradictory, incoherent. Uh, Moses may not, probably didn't even exist. Um, in other words, the vast majority of people teaching Old Testament in Bible colleges and seminaries do not hold the view of the Old Testament that Jesus held.

And many of them know it and don't mind that at all. Because in their more honest moments, they would say Jesus was a first century Jew. He was going to believe what first century Jews believed. And we've gotten beyond all that.

I remember the first time I heard someone just straight out say that it was, it was Daniel Kirk in that debate with Robert Gagnon, uh, in, I don't know, 10 years ago in Scottsdale. Um, and man, it just, I knew it intellectually, but to hear someone actually boldly say it, I don't know, I was almost getting ready to duck from the splatter once the lightning bolt came just all over the place, but it didn't happen.

Um, not yet anyways. So anyway, uh, these views of the Old Testament lead to the collapse. So there was no flood. God would never do that. The conquest of Canaan sort of happened slowly. It wasn't God's judgment for the idolatry of the peoples.

Everything in the Old Testament just becomes a narrative that had use at a time, but doesn't have any use anymore. All right. So with, with that as, as the background, um, a view of the view of scripture and the consistency and coherence of Old Testament and New Testament just isn't a major part of people's thinking.

And when it comes to talking about God's goodness, a large portion of the people who are engaged in that conversation are sort of hoping we don't ask about some of that rough stuff in the Old Testament.

Because I think if you pushed them, um, you know, D'Souza's got this book coming out on archaeology in the Bible. Again, there's 10 ,000 books on archaeology in the Bible. Get one from someone who's actually an archaeologist.

I just cannot see how there'd be anything worthwhile to this, but, um, he'd be hard pressed. Uh, maybe someone will take the time to do this. He would be hard pressed to answer, um, for many of the things that God does in the Old Testament in light of the things he said about God's goodness and omnibenevolence, whatever in the world that means.

God is all-loving. What does that mean? Was God all-loving in the destruction of Jericho, the destruction of Ai, destruction of the Amorites? Was God all-loving in the flood? Um, was God all-loving in the plagues in Egypt?

What does that mean? How do you define love in light of those events? Um, so it'd be interesting to see. So, anyways, Mike Porter just, I didn't ask him to do it. He just saw a tweet from Jenna Ellis mocking Calvinists about God is good, but God does terrible, horrible things.

And so he told us in our ministry chat channel, he was going to be writing a multi-part series for the blog. Um, he writes for it, and Chris Wissonette writes for it, and they write a whole lot more than I do because I'm busy doing this program.

This is my contribution to the blog, basically. Um, so, lo and behold, it's on how do you define God's goodness in light of all of these things, voluntarism and all the rest of the discussion of how God's goodness is actually defined by his nature.

You know, it parallels in a lot of ways how you deal with Sola Scriptura and the sufficiency of Scripture. It has to do with the nature of Scripture, as Theanostas, and how God's nature is definitive of that which he creates, and stuff like that.

And so, lo and behold, the first two had already been posted, and so I responded and posted those up there. And of course, someone, I forget what someone's response was. Well, there's White again, read my book.

It's like, I didn't write it. You know, they don't even look at it. They don't. There are so few serious interlocutors on X at times, it's pretty amazing. So, in the midst of all this, um, okay, I missed, okay, anyways, I can't start reading X right now.

That would not be very good. Soteriology 101, Leighton Flowers, posted this as part of that discussion. It's called The Worst Calvinist Argument by Sean Wilson. Now, he says that this was posted, copied and pasted from the Soteriology 101 Facebook page.

So, evidently, Facebook is as infected with bad theology as X is. But man, the last thing I'd ever want to do would be engage it over on Facebook. So, here we have the worst argument is that since God planned the crucifixion, we can believe that he planned every other evil in world history.

This is not only an abuse of a passage, since this was never Luke's intent in acts, but it undermines the glory of the cross. Well, a couple things. Luke is simply recording the prayer of the early church.

That's the first thing to recognize. So, he is intending for us to know exactly how the early church responded to persecution, and they did so from a view of history that demonstrated that they believed that what had taken place in the life and ministry of Jesus had taken place at the predestined plan of God.

The church in Acts 4 .27 -28, we walked through this text just a couple programs ago, the church clearly believes that there is a predestined decree of God, and they functioned in light of that predestined decree.

Now, provisionists do not. You do not hear provisionists do not pray the way that the early church prayed in Acts 4 .27 -28. They just don't. They don't speak of God's decree. They don't talk about predestination.

That is not a functional aspect of their theology. So, I just point out they struggle with Acts 4 .27 -28 because they don't pray like Acts 4 .27 -28. My church does. My church even prays that way in the sick room, at the graveside, because it is an overarching understanding of God's sovereign providence in this world that flows from his decree.

So, everything has purpose. Nothing is purposeless. God isn't staying up there going, oh, I just wish I could have done something about this. No, that's not how it works. So, first, he says, the cross is the greatest act of love ever from God's perspective and our own.

Calvary brings life, sin brings death, they are in no way comparable. Well, I don't know what they are in no way comparable is supposed to mean, to be honest with you. That doesn't make any sense to me.

Certainly, the cross is the greatest act of love ever from God's perspective and our own. However, it is also the greatest act of human evil. Right? The only truly innocent man to ever be executed by the greatest power on the earth at that time and by the people of God with their approval.

So, it is the greatest act of evil. And so, part of the idea is, if the greatest act of evil could bring about the greatest good and that was the result of God's decree, which this side will not even admit exists, that reminds me.

Oh, drat. I didn't have time to type this out. Have a new term for us. We, Rich remembers the first term we came up with because he likes the term that we came up with, the bulimacoi, but I've got a new term that I'll introduce.

I'll try to, if we have time, but before the end of the program, I'll try to introduce it to you, but I wanted to have the positive side. So, you've got the bulimacoi who fight against the decree of God.

What do you call someone? Hey, some of you who are into forming Greek words and things like that, what term would you use? Because there's about four that I had to choose from, but what term would you use to refer to one who either loves the decree of God, and so philosophy is going to be in there, so philiboli, or submits to the decree of God, and so loves it in that way, in recognizing that it's going, recognizing Romans 8 .28, and so we'll talk about that.

I was going to put a little graphic up and forgot because I was doing this stuff. Anyway, so yes, Calvary brings life out of death, but what, but in this context, the people who acted, the people who acted, Herod, Pontius Pilate, the Romans, and the Jews.

Okay, so two individuals, two groups. The people who acted, acted in a evil fashion, and what we're going to discover here is, well, okay, second, the cross is an act of self-sacrifice. It's one thing for Jesus to willingly lay down his life.

It's another for him to predetermine a child's murder. If Jesus had predetermined a single murder while on earth, he would not be the holy, perfect son of God, let alone every murder in history. Laying down your own life is not ordaining sin.

Now, there's massive category confusion here. This gentleman has not thought these things through well. We'll see how bad it is here in a moment, but when we talk about God's decree, we're talking about the decree of the triune God, Father, Son, Holy Spirit together, so you need to understand something here, and this is, okay, this is, this might be tough for some people, okay.

Jesus, as part of the triune God, as the second person of the triune God, predetermined the destruction of Jericho, the flood that killed almost every single human being on earth. Do you know how many babies died in the flood?

I don't know how many babies died in the flood, but a lot of babies died in the flood, a lot of little children. That's why so many people don't believe in the flood, because they've thought that through, and they don't want to believe in a God who would bring judgment, so when they see, when they see God commanding Joshua and the troops of Israel to destroy every man, woman, and child, can't do it, can't do it.

Why? Emotion. Because, see, if you push them, you would say, so, can God bring his judgment to bear on sin at any time he wants to? The only answer they should give, given their emotions, is no, he can only do what we tell him to do.

But many of them will go, well, yeah, because they know God can't truly be just and holy unless he can bring his judgment against sin when he determines to bring his judgment against sin. But once you, once you accept that, you're stuck.

What are you going to do now? Because God determined to bring his judgment to bear on Ai one day, on Jericho one day, on the Amorites one day, on the Egyptians one day. Ever watch the Ten Commandments?

They did a really good job. Man, they made movies back then. Ben-Hur, Ten Commandments, wow. When you didn't have CGI, you had to actually do things. Do you remember the night of the Passover? Do you remember what you heard in the background?

I mean, you have to listen, but there are women screaming in the soundtrack, in the background, when you see Pharaoh, because their firstborn sons are dying. There were little babies that died. There were babies that were a week old that died.

Do you believe that? Because if you don't believe that, you need to recognize what is the primary symbolic narrative used in the New Testament to talk about the supper and the sacrifice? Passover, the exodus, the destruction of the firstborn.